CD Projekt announces the preliminary launch of
GOG.com, a marketplace for "Good Old
Games." The site, which will go live in September, will offer its titular good
old games will all necessary updates to install and run them on current
computers (including Vista support), completely stripped of DRM, and all priced
between $5.99 and $9.99. The site will enter closed beta testing in August, and
visitors are being offered the opportunity to sign up for a chance to be a
tester. There are Q&As about all of this with PR rep Tom Ohle on
Shacknews and
Gamasutra
discussing, among other things, whether they are concerned with piracy of the
DRM-free games. The site also has an image of game boxes illustrating the types
of offerings they plan, showing Giants, Operation Flashpoint,
TOCA Race Driver 3, Fallout 2, Freespace 2, MDK,
Colin McRae 2005, and Fallout Tactics. Here's the announcement:

Warsaw, Poland – July 10, 2008. CD Projekt, best known in the Western
world for its award-winning PC RPG, The Witcher, is proud to unveil its
invention of time travel. The company sent several representatives to the past
and they’ve returned with some amazing findings. Quick to capitalize on the
incredible treasures of history, the company is pleased to reveal its newest
project, GOG.com. The site, whose name is an acronym for Good Old Games, is a
new games-on-demand platform that allows old fogies (and young fogies) to buy
some of the best PC games of all time – many of which just can't be found in
stores anymore – and play them on modern hardware, completely free of intrusive
DRM. GOG.com is poised to become the center of the classic-games universe with a
huge community section including forums, user reviews and ratings, as well as
insightful commentary and editorials from some of the industry’s most beloved
writers. A closed public beta of the site is scheduled for launch on August 1st,
and excited old-school gamers can sign up for more info and a chance to enter
the beta by visiting GOG.com.

The site makes it tremendously easy for gamers to buy, download and install some
of their all-time favorite PC games. The games will be sold for $5.99 or $9.99,
are guaranteed to work on Windows Vista and Windows XP systems and are available
to download as many times as needed. This is very nice, yes? The DRM-free games,
low prices, the site’s ease-of-use and the community are some of the main
features that make Good Old Games something more than just another digital
distribution outlet.

GOG.com has already lined up agreements with such publishers as Interplay and
Codemasters to make their games available on the site. Among the titles those
companies are bringing to the site are in-demand classics like Fallout,
Freespace 2, Operation Flashpoint: Game of the Year Edition and TOCA Race Driver
3. Negotiations are in progress with several other publishers, with the ultimate
goal of GOG.com offering a comprehensive collection of classic PC games from the
80s, 90s and 2000s.

“Our main goal is to create a user-friendly site with the best classic PC games
for a price that might be considered impossible to achieve,” said Adam
Oldakowski, Managing Director of GOG.com. “The people behind GOG.com are gamers
and we all know how difficult it is to find a lot of classic games. So we’ve
started building a great games catalogue, gotten rid of the copy protection that
gamers hate so much, optimized the games to work on modern operating systems,
and made them cheap enough that piracy seems like a rip-off. It’s so easy to
buy, download and install a game and then get deeply involved in the community;
we’re very confident that gamers will absolutely love the site.”